skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember a similar test from one of the books by Lister & DeMarco. They also mentioned one caveat not present in the linked article: they advice not to let the candidate choose the topic but instead let them prepare a presentation on a pre-chosen one. The rationale for this is that you might see passion and quality that are only attached to topics the candidate is passionate about if the choice of the topic is with the candidate.
If you haven't dealt with an elevated fraud risk yet then you are not yet running a successful business.

Dealing with fraud and abuse takes up a good percentage of the time and other resources at any successful online service. If you don't budget for that and automate it as much as you can then you will possibly fail even though the rest of your service is doing fine.
These numbers are non-sense. He drops the price from $49 to free, then assumes you'd have exactly the same number of customers, and says how much money you lost. But if you made the service free you'd have a hell of a lot more customers at the lowest tier.

It doesn't matter because he made up a % for the amount that upgrade to higher plans, which would be the paying plans if free was the lowest, and that % would be completely different for free users vs. already paying users. You can't just change one number like this.

Google has released stats that apps that moved over to in-app payments from paid apps make 20x the amount they did previously. Making people pay to enter is not good business.
I write all these things for you. I brain, "what would mechanical_fish like to read about today", and my brain responds, "FIVE HUNDRED PAGES OF RANTING ABOUT THE UNFAIRNESS OF CISPA COVERAGE", and I oblige. You're welcome.
To dig in a little further, when we say base N, we mean that we are expressing an integer as a sum of the values N^i (for i being every nonnegative integer), each multiplied by a weight that is an integer between 0 and N-1 inclusive.

Why do we do this? Because every integer has exactly one unique representation in this system. We could have picked any values we wanted for the places (rather than N^i) but unless we pick carefully, either some numbers aren't representable, or some numbers have multiple representations.

Base one has a problem right from the start, which is that 1^i = 1 for any value of i - when all places have the same place value, numbers aren't going to have a unique representation. The other problem is that the only number you can write in base one is zero, because the only possible weight (the only integer between 0 and N-1) is 0.

When you write 1111 = 4 you are sneakily using the length of the number on the page to encode the value. The length of the number on the page isn't supposed to matter. In base 10, 17 = 017 = 0017 = 00017.
There might be some interesting things that could be done with TypeScript<->Dart interop. If you look at TypeScript as a way to add types to existing JS code, Dart might be able to use that type information to create interfaces for JS objects.
Can anyone provide an explanation of this in layman's terms? I took a look at wikipedia but am having a hard time wrapping my head around it..
Hakin9 mag wants to sue me because I wrote about their spamming business model
Programming Languages Should Satisfy College Language Requirements
So the 'screw you' should transfer along with the debt and vultures aren't a legitimate problem?
Hmm, I'm not sure I like the idea of intentionally trying to steer the candidate off on a tangent. It feels like a trap.

In an interview, the interviewer literally has all the power, and saying "no" or refusing to answer a question posed by the interviewer seems rather difficult.

This would be doubly hard for me since I like to teach (both my parents are teachers and I love to explain things to people so that they can understand them). If a person shows genuine interest in a topic by asking a question that might go in a tangent, I generally want their curiosity to be sated before moving on; in some cases a deeper understanding of a related topic will help educate them on the main topic.

Anyway, I think I would fall for this trap for both reasons (not wanting to refuse the interviewer and also wanting to genuinely teach someone). I'm conflicted.

However, I like the overall idea of the question. So much time during actual real-world development is spent communicating between coworkers about how a system works or will be implemented. I think being able to gauge a candidate's communication/knowledge transfer ability is very important and a good indicator of success.
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/microsites/phonefraud/report.shtm...
I mean this question honestly: are you American? Because back in the States, mentioning that I'm a socialist would bring the reply, "So why are you working in private industry instead of for the government? Are you here to infiltrate our business?", and things of that nature. At that point I'm not explaining anything, I'm in a debate over whether left-wingers are violating our own principles by ever working in a private, capitalist business (the proper answer is, of course we are, but nobody living under capitalism can actually boycott all capitalist enterprises and remain alive day-to-day). At that point, I've failed the interview by dragging myself off-topic and into an argument.

Point is, yes, outside the US, and to a lesser extent the rest of the Anglosphere, approximately half the world has some kind of left-wing views. Probably as many people have a hobby someone might embarrass them about. It's just not very common in polite company, in most cultures (where I live now it's downright common), to bring up this kind of out-of-work stuff as part of a job interview.

As to the anime, I once mentioned in a daily SCRUM meeting that I wanted to get done a meeting with my team leader before 5:30 because I wanted to get to an anime club at 6PM. A senior colleague, who I really do like and admire most of the time, said that Rule 1 of Anime Club is never to talk about Anime Club. This man was a professional software engineer, working in a software company, who had himself sold bootlegged imported anime back in the '90s as a side gig, and here he was engaging in geek-shaming.

That was one of the many things which made me feel deeply, deeply uncomfortable in that workplace, the other one being the fact that many people there openly and enthusiastically brought up their right-wing libertarian views (without my prompting, this was between other person 1 and other person 2) during work hours.

Overall, the various little details I hadn't detected at the interview eventually added up to a gestalt feeling that the place had the company culture of a particularly right-wing frat-house. I didn't last long there before leaving... on good terms with everyone, but feeling uncomfortable and ashamed nonetheless of leaving a job too early-in.

Hmm.... which means that for small companies like that one, you've actually got a very good point. If I bring up something controversial or unusual and the interviewer can't accept that I have views and hobbies outside work which he/she deliberately asked to hear about (provided I don't go into some boring technical lecture on an obscure topic in Computer Science I like or a physics discovery I don't actually understand nearly as well as I think I do), then it's almost definitely not a good match of a place to work for me. The model just breaks down when we're talking about large companies, or places that have a lot of good going for them outside their company culture.
Confessions Of A Teenage Xbox Hacker
They'll refund unused time.
"You don't do that when you are flush with cash."

How do you jump from "we're almost cash-flow positive" to "we're flush with cash"?

And isn't Tesla's situation a little too tenuous for them to be feeling sorry for diluting their shareholders? Making viable electric cars is their priority - not making their investors rich ASAP.
HP CEO: We’re screwed (for the next few years)
The constant dissonance between "don't you dare touch all the subsidies we give the petro" industries and the "dont you dare waste money on any alternatives" is just dumbfounding. I mean, the stuff is orthogonal to politics (or at least it should be).
> I like to store electrons to conserve keystrokes.

But re-posting the same stuff over and over does not conserve page space. Maybe you could link to your older comment instead of re-posting it?
> Why would you be so afraid to talk about them?

Presumably because you want the job. You wouldn't want to talk about them for the same reasons you wouldn't bring up religion or politics or any other hotly contested subject.

I like Anime, I watch My Little Pony, but I wouldn't bring either up in an interview. Why? Because I know what most of the rest of the world thinks of me with just those two statements. I have MLP shirts, my wife knows people that said 'If I saw a grown man walking around with one of them on I would take my children somewhere away from that pedophile.' That is basically verbatim, with no exaggeration. I am not ashamed of my interests, but I am not mentioning them in an interview.

Of course, I'm also not looking for a job to stand in for a social club either. The only 'fit' I am interested in is can I do the job and are my co-workers not idiots.
Clearly the Internet is now teaming up with Canadians to poison our drugs.
Can we expect a Chrome plug-in that does fake opinion analysis on HN?
"The Data Channel API is not implemented and its implementation is being discussed in the standards committee"
http://www.webrtc.org/faq-recent-topics

WebRTC is currently some weird wrapper around ICE and nat traversal protocols, not something that seems useful for sending generic javascript-land ArrayBuffers or similar.
Agree, very classy. I think everyone involved has had enough of the Javascript stalemate and is ready to move on.
How to Escape From a Black Hole
Now if you are the type of person who thinks a racist joke is a "bad" joke, then I guess you also hate South Park and love to bathe in politically-correct self-righteousness.

I don't know much about South Park. Not sure about self-righteousness either. But I like to bathe in the feeling that I don't accidentally insult people I have no intent to insult. That's why I try to be careful with my jokes (racist-wise or otherwise).
I had to do this in an interview for a software project manager position. I presented on how GFP-tagging of proteins works in biochemistry research, to an audience of glassy eyed HR reps.

I was hired, but the point is that you can't allow the presenter to take something too technical, otherwise the audience won't understand the jargon.
You might want to consider using client-side prediction and lag compensation.

Here's John Carmack describing how he used the aforementioned techniques to make Quake playable over the internet: http://fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/johnc-log.aug.htm

Here's how Valve do it:

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Latency_Compensatin...

And here's another good article on the topic:
http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/wha...

Oh, and here's one implementing it with Node / HTML5: http://buildnewgames.com/real-time-multiplayer/

Good luck.
> Our own teams have a set of practices which are similar but different from what Linus outlines here. And different projects on my company use different practices from those.

The culture around your product is probably very different from the kernel devs' culture so it makes sense for you to have a different model.

> The worst thing is that there's no way of enforcing these workflows or practices other than out-of-band social conventions. And so minor mistakes happen, all the time. Our Git projects are never as pretty as they should be.

Enforcing certain kinds of work flow would mean not allowing something that is currently possible. Crippling one workflow to standardize on another, while there is no clear evidence that one workflow would be the best for everyone.

I agree 100%. Tools that attempt to defined culture are an enormous pain and often unusable outside the context understood by their creators. Tools that help you reinforce the culture you decide on for your project are wonderful, but they are rarely as un-opinionated as they need to be.

One thing that strikes me about source control culture is that in centralized environments people are very aggressive about installing pre-commit hooks to enforce rules, but I rarely see people using hooks for git, or even including hooks in their project as a suggestion for other developers to use. I wonder why not?
I doubt you can ever create a Marketplace that requires bought buyer and seller without using the freemium approach.
An xxx domain and blog posts on programming messes up my mind.
This is some good stuff. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what can be done with it and perhaps the spam all over certain phpBB forums, etc, can be fixed. Of course, those are just the little fish.
> and you should already be preparing to talk about your hobbies and interests

What!? How is that in the slightest bit relevant?
"Privacy is a relic of a time gone by" -Sean Parker
I would have thought that the author would have bothered to proof read the question.
While the GP's comment might be a little... racist? isn't your own experience prejudiced as well? I certainly wouldn't characterize the entirety of the US by the people I work with in the Valley.
But the problem (much like a qubit) can go one of two ways. Either D-Wave have built a 512-qubit quantum computer - in which case the CIA / NSA will be strongly suggesting that they don't tell anyone, or they haven't - in which case they won't be telling anyone. The fact that they're not supplying any proof, therefore, contains no useful information.
The article is down, is it not?

Edit: NVM, the website is back up.
I'm waiting for the 3d printer you download and assemble entirely from 3d-printed parts.
I love 3D printers, but this is the third one I've seen this week in addition to MakerBot and Form 1. I'm really not understanding what the differentiator is after seeing the video except a slight change in price.
Yep. I really had the guy going. I spent a lot of time with him, at first feigning suspicion about who they were, then finally muddling around with the computer coming up with every possible way to make things difficult, but always remaining polite and thanking him repeatedly for "getting me out of a bind" and other silly sounding colloquialisms. I started pressing the info button on my phone so it would beep, and he gave me a number with a 918 area code. I looked it up and it's an Oklahoma number. That doesn't mean much though. The numbers could be issued by a SIP provider that terminates pretty much anywhere in the world.
Just because hiring is subjective doesn't mean everyone is equally subjective with respect to race/gender/etc.

I mean, aesthetics are subjective too but most people prefer not to have poo on a pedestal in their living room.

You can find strong and widespread biases (e.g., against fecal art) even in a subjective domain.
>> And worse (or better, depending on your tastes), just over the horizon is an explicit Patent Office rule change that will grant a patent to the first filer, regardless of whether or not that person has any connection to the creation of the idea being patented:

> This is false.

Yes, it is false, and it's too late for me to reword my original post. I should have emphasized that first-to-file applies to two or more people, all of whom are working on inventions so close together as to be indistinguishable.

A claimant might try to assert priority but not be actually involved in the work, or someone might purchase the right to pursue a claim but not be directly involved, but these are perversions of the intent of the change.
my thoughts exactly while reading this article.

Great. nice maps. how do i use them?

and I was using a nokia handset overseas for the last month! only thing i could put there was an old version of google maps for s60.
>I liked your post, but this point I don't think I can relate to.

I think potatolicious is referring to things like "is it true you black guys are well-endowed" or "I bet you Asian guys are really good a math and karate," etc.
Are NFL teams hacking helmet headsets?
Your licenses page (http://powderkeg.artillery.com/attribution.html) is down and otherwise, there's no reference to Bomberman here at all.

It's a well-executed game though. Haven't found any flaws, but I can't really say it's original. Good proof-of-concept for HTML5!
> It is a reasonable position that if you have no interests, or hobbies, or any read books at all that you are comfortable talking about with your employer, that you are likely a poor fit for the company.

Really? I dunno--I always saw employment as more of a business transaction, and I don't give a damn about the personal lives of those I do business with.
For what it's worth, the way I read HN is:

a) Skim the front page

b) Go to tptacek's comments page and read everything

Almost every comment you write having anything to do with crypto is absolutely fascinating and since realizing how much I enjoy and learn from your comments I've been actively stalking you. Thanks.
All I see is a desert background with nothing happening and "Channel 0 closed." in my js console.
A lot of public key cryptography methods used in the real world are based on the fact that factoring really big numbers is computationally unfeasible. Shor's algorithm makes it feasible, but it's a quantum algorithm that can't be run on a classical computer. Basically, alot of stuff won't be secure anymore when it's feasible to run Shor's algorithm.
And it will be made out of lego, or at least lego-compatible construction system.
Forward Q&A on PHP Framework Design with MongoDB
This seems to be a very sensible default way to handle the comparison, assuming the programmer already knows about the problems with floating point math. A programmer who does not know about that will probably trip up sooner or later no matter how the language implements comparison.

So personally I would not see it as "right" (or "wrong"), simply because it is a choice between many different methods with their own advantages and disadvantages. I view this not as a problem a language can (or has to) solve, but as one a programmer has to be aware of and has to solve depending on his particular application.
Sure, the risk was originally on the primary lender. But later on they can sell their stake to get rid of the remaining risk. There's nothing wrong with buying a lot of debt that is likely to default. I agree though that if the country actually defaults then the vulture shouldn't get anything.
> That's not correct.

You're right, it is not correct, my wording is misleading, and it's too late for me to change the original.

There will be times when the first to file has no right to do so, but if the system works, such claims will be cast out on their lack of merit.
I get deja vu every time I see that Parallela schematic: http://www.tilera.com/sites/default/files/productbriefs/PB01...
All good links, thanks! We are in fact using client-side prediction and lag compensation. It's extremely difficult to make a perfectly-playable action game with 500ms ping — you'd be kicked off a Quake server with that kind of lag :)

Powderkeg uses lockstep network synchronization and every client sees the same simulation (though the player you control has prediction). The network framerate is 10 FPS and the server waits 2 ticks to collect input, so anyone with more than a 200ms ping to the gameserver will have a less-than-desirable experience.
Impressionist: Magazine & Corporate WordPress Theme
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How to create Android services in Java
Entrepreneurship and arranged marriages are rarely an ideal match
And the corporate porn filter @ my work...
The same article he linked to says that PayPal had trouble hiring women, so... you know, I'm not sure legality came into the equation.
Android app development growing at a faster rate than iOS
How do you know how much traffic you will get?

I have no idea how many people visit HN and how many click on any given link in what space of time.

Maybe PG or someone can give some guidance?
Pardon me for semi-hijacking the thread, but can you explain your comment about hellbanning being unfortunate? When I first read about the idea, I thought it was pretty ingenious. However, I haven't thought about it deeply, nor studied its true effects, so I'm interested in what makes you say that.
What about the "ad-likes", where FB shows "Your friend Jill likes ponies. Here's an ad for My Little Ponies" -- are these similarly prevented?

Breaking things tends to make unhappy the people using.
Thanks for featuring Contur!
Do they get paid to do that? If no one got paid, there would be almost no need for performance reviews.
I would never, under any circumstances, tell my interviewer to "stay on topic." How should I know what he believes to be relevant? If he no longer wants to quiz me on my abilities as a developer but would rather discuss the airspeed velocity of swallows, I would assume that he has a reason for doing so, and I would gladly share with him with my limited knowledge of avian aeronautics.
Personally, I've never been a fan of branching and merging. I don't think it works well at all for small groups. Maybe if you're in a big corp. though.
Hey...I'm the author of the post. You're completely right. The numbers are non-sense. We wanted to outline a quick example of the impact of freemium with all things being equal. Of course, things would change, especially with differing market forces. We probably could have been a bit clearer about that or explained it in a much different manner. Additionally, we could write a follow on post with a real world example based off white labeled data to prove the point much more efficiently.

In terms of making people pay to enter, I think it really depends. As we explained, if you're not in a position to truly move folks from a value limited free taste of a product to a premium tier, then I'd say you're better off growing slowly before opening up the floodgates. Take a look at Wistia or MailChimps approach. Of course, there are great counterexamples, as well.

Thanks for the feedback!
I'm waiting when you can get plastic in a form that works with these things at $2/pound.
Unplayable ("Waiting for other players").
Great now a .xxx is on my work browsing history. Can we stop this please?
Be Kind; People Will Remember
Ideally the architect is looking at a 'proposed' plan rather than what got implemented.

There is an entirely different (and very valuable) class of folks to can take an existing screw up and map out a series of steps to un-screw it up [1]. :-)

[1] I used to watch the New Yankee Workshop on PBS and see Norm cut lumber and then have it fit together so closely and smoothly that it practically didn't need glue. I suggested to my wife we could make a TV show which explored creative uses for a 2 x 4 that was 1/2" too short for its original purpose, or other parts that were made scrap by an imprecise execution of the 'cut to size' phase.
There's no reference to the actual allegations, not even a link to the original post.

Did you actually read the article? There's a link to the original article describing the allegations in the second sentence: http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/02/kixeye-takes-substantial-c... That article in turn links the post that started everything (although the post has since been removed to the link is dead).